03/09/2012 - Tom Heene's three shorts turned into a feature lack direction, but benefit from powerful performances

Tom Heene's first feature, Welcome Home [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which is being screened in the International Critics' Week at Venice, doesn't make too much effort to hide its origins - three short films about a powerful feminine character, Lila (Manah Depauw). Heene turns them into a feature, but the 73-minutes result lacks coherence and struggles to find a convincing direction despite its actors' energetic performances.

It's impossible to describe Welcome Home in a few words. An ode to Brussels? The story of a woman fighting for independence? An accusation targeted at the young and heartless eurocrats? A commentary about a harmful pan-European integration? Welcome Home is all of these, but it might have worked better as a series of short films.

At first we see Lila meeting Bilal (Nader Farman), an Iranian who visits Brussels after four decades of absence. He says that the European capital's architect should be “whipped, like they do in Iran”, which is an obvious statement towards the ever-expanding Brussels. Bilal has come to reconnect with friends he hasn't seen since his departure, but they cannot be found. Are they lost in the labyrinthine Brussels, where bureaucracy and indifference poison everything?

In the second short film, Lila reconnects with Benji (Kurt Vandendriessche), her boyfriend she has left three months before in order to rediscover herself. It's the most intense part of Welcome Home and in the same time the most unconvincing, with naïve dialogue and implausible reactions. Heene replaces emotion with more or less explicit sex and then pushes the wrong buttons for a finale that will puzzle the audience, in a more than obvious statement against the artificial capital of the European Union.